Reflections on Reality and Imagination

                                                                          Strattford Caldecott (1953-2014)

Have been reading The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, by Stratford Caldecott. Good read. Among the many themes is the “elvishness” or “fairy,” as indicated in this passage:

The desire to see Elves, like the desire to see a dragon, is not merely a desire to see a particular kind of exotic creature but a desire for Faërie, the world, realm, or state in which such creatures have their being. If we really found a fire-breathing lizard in a zoo, that would be very boring: not what we were looking for at all. The other realm is desired precisely because it is “imaginary.” It is desired because of something we find there, of which the very substance of that world is somehow composed. Some have called this “magic” but…Tolkien prefers the word “enchantment.” It is not an escape from reality.

 

Then he quotes a passage from Tolkien’s essay on fairy tales: 

Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all the things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

 

The point is all these things become enchanted. Faërie makes more luminous the things of our world. Like Plato’s archetypes: they are perhaps a deeper form of the archetypical than Plato’s abstract ideas, for the imagination reaches far deeper than the mere intellect. Again, Tolkien is quoted:

 

By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root ant stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

 

Thus Tolkien relates that it was first in fairy-tales that he “first divined the potency of words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” And now I will let Caldecott continue the thought:

 

The realm of Faërie is an imaginary world, which is to say that it is made from images of real things as a pot is made of clay or a painting is made of paint. Yet we go there seeking a light that we cannot find in the primary world. The action of making or experiencing such a world is in part a creative act; we are in fact claiming our birthright to “make by the law in which we’re made”; made, that is, in the image and likeness of a Maker.” The imaginal is where we sense most strongly the essence of creativity, of the divine imagination that conceives and gives life to the primary world. It is where words are born. It is the world where things could be other than they are, or time, because it is seen against a background that looms much closer in Faërie: the background of pure light, or pure darkness.

. . .

I remember going into the forest of Eastern Kentucky (Red River Gorge) after not really having entered a real forest since childhood in the Smokey Mountains. I was struck by a kind of joy and said – “just like Fanghorn Forest!” My first thought was of Tolkien’s ‘fairy’ woods. I could only see the forest in the primary world as “enchanted” in the light of the imaginary forest I had imagined so vividly as a reader of Tolkien. (I read the Lord of the Rings practically every summer from 18 to 26, and thereafter whenever I felt “depressed.”) I don’t think my feeling that the forest in Red River Gorge was enchanted was a subjective projection onto “natural resources” or “raw material”; there was nothing sentimental about it. I think Fanghorn allowed me to see the reality of the forest in the primary world I would otherwise have been blind to. The meaning, moreover, of “fallen” becomes clear: to see the world cut off from the light that I found in the imaginative work of Tolkien. I know what sin is because of this experience.

 Peter Kreeft makes the same point in his book about Tolkien: The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings.

In The Lord of the Rings everything seems to be more itself, more Platonic. The earth is more earthy, nature is more natural, history is more historical, the genealogies more genealogical the tragedy more tragic, the joy more joyful, the caverns more cavernous, the forests more foresty, and the heroes more heroic.

   Indeed, the four forests mentioned in The Lord of the Rings have more character, more identity than most human characters in most novels. You could not possibly confuse the Old Forest, Lothlorien, Fanghorn, and Mirkwood with each other. If you found yourself in any one of them, you would instantly know which. When we read The Lord of the Rings, why do these forests seem “real” or “true”? Why do we believe them? Not because they are like the forests we have walked through in this world, but because the forests we have walked through in this world were a little like them. Tolkien’s forests do not remind us of ours; ours remind us of his.

 

That is just how I experienced it.

 

. . .

 

I have to think of babies in this light. Amazing how defenseless babies are. If a man murders a lover to protect his reputation or whatever, it's murder and he can be punished. If it is a baby, he can want it killed with no worldly consequence, and if he is godless anyway he won't care about the death of his soul. Only the mother in the end can protect the life of an unborn child. Amazing when you think about it. Power over life and death. Makes all the difference whether she sees babies in the light of love or in the darkness of the capitalist-liberal-godless world. Christmas before capitalism destroyed it provided an archetype of the human baby – very much as Tolkien’s forest provided an archetype of the Kentucky forest I walked in. And Mary provides an archetype (not stereotype!) of woman. Feminists of a certain type will cringe here; woman and men who could only think it sentimental to see an unborn baby in this light, ruin one’s career or personal “happiness” over an unintended, unwanted pregnancy. If a tree is blocking my view, cut it down. For me that is the difference between living in sin, which is to say being cut off from reality, truth, and living in sin while longing for reality and truth, which is to say love of the world. There is an unbridgeable chasm between a person who sees a baby in the light of a pure love (such as Mary’s) and one who sees it as an unwanted biological part of a woman’s body that can be easily removed. Different incommensurable alternative universes. In my view light and darkness.

. . .

None of us live in the light. We can glimpse it on special occasions – during Mass, reading Tolkien, walking in a forest, witnesses the birth of your child. But we are all human; we get drawn back into the prosaic state of mind, and cannot see the enchantment of the world. As Max Weber said, modernity disenchanted (entzauberte) the world. Here is the thought expressed in the 7^th Elegy of Rilke, who bravely fought against this disenchantment.

 

To be here at all is a glory.

You knew it, maidens,

even those of you seemingly

passed over, sinking into

the city’s meanest streets,

festering alleys choked with

trash and stinking of excretions.

Each of you had her hour,

or if not an hour,

an instant, at least,

between two moments when

life burst into flower.

Every blessed petal.

Your veins throbbed with it.

But we so soon forget what

our laughing neighbor neither

applauds nor envies.

We desire that they be admired,

but even the most visible

of joys cannot be seen

until transformed-within.

Nowhere, beloved, does any

world exist save that within.

 So sinner though we are, to long for the world as it was made, to suffer that kind of Sehnsucht, defines a certain type of human possibility. It is not a desire to flee the earth for a purely spiritualized Heaven but to be in the world as originally created in all its glory. It is a way of staying “true to the earth” much different from Nietzsche’s. To lose this longing is to be condemned in a prison house and forget there is a world outside the prison. But it is the same world, a prison or a paradise. It depends on whether it is “transformed-within.”

     C. S. Lewis described in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy this painful longing for transcendence within the world as joy: 

I call it Joy. 'Animal-Land' was not imaginative. But certain other experiences were... The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?... Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased... In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else... The quality common to the three experiences... is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again... I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.

 

And in his essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis connects this joy to imaginative works that open the doors to Faërie: 

Do fairy tales teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfillment— ‘fantasy’ in the technical psychological sense of the word— instead of facing the problems of the real world? Now it is here that the problem becomes subtle. Let us again lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labeled a ‘Boy’s Book’ or a ‘Girl’s Book’, as distinct from a ‘Children’s Book.’ There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairyland. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undividedly discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego.

    The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration. The other longing, that for fairyland, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale?—really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, Tar from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new ‘dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.